Should you give up trying to be talented if you're weak at a skill?
Let's say you've decided you're hopeless at cooking. Should you just give up, because the "cooking gene" is not part of your makeup? Or have you been given the wrong advice for most of your life?
Hairdressers love my wife's hair.
"It's so lovely," they say. "It's wavy and so thick". My wife, Renuka, doesn't care very much for the waviness. Often enough, she'll be back from the hairdresser with her hair straightened out. And by the next day, if she doesn't straighten her hair, it's back to wavy. She's always had wavy hair and was probably born with it.
Most people believe that's how talent works.
When you're born, you've got a set number of gifts. From that point on, it's up to you to develop those gifts or let them wither. And this kind of "inborn talent" concept is terrific if you have conventional abilities. When most of us talk about talent, we're usually referring to something like drawing, painting, cooking, dancing, singing—everyday sort of gift that all of us can relate to. We might even go so far as to say that a person is good at computers or Photoshop. Which sounds perfectly normal, except it's not.
Before February 19, 1990, no one had seen or used Photoshop.
The first computer? That goes back to around 1938. This is to say that if you were born before 1990, or 1938, you simply could not have either of these "inborn gifts". Both of these gifts, and many others, showed up pretty miraculously, only after the invention of the technology. If we stop skimming the surface of talent with dancing, singing, maths and other everyday activities, we struggle to justify a lot of "inborn talent abilities". If there's no invention, there's no ability.
At which point, our brain is scrambling to justify the position of "inborn talent."
"Maybe the person has natural computational abilities", we think to ourselves. "And that the invention of the computer or Photoshop merely brought those computational abilities to the fore." Fair point, until we realise that many people who are seemingly good at these skills had no interest in them at all. Michael Phelps, for instance, is recognised as one of the greatest Olympians of all time. He's won 28 medals. Born swimmer? Sure, except that Phelps hated swimming with a passion.
And of course, there's Roger Federer.
His early passions weren't centred around tennis at all. "I was just dreaming of just once meeting Boris Becker or being able to play at Wimbledon sometime," said Federer when talking to his biographer. Though his mother taught tennis, she wasn't keen to work with him. "He would have just upset me anyway," she said. "He tried out every strange stroke and certainly never returned a ball normally. That is simply no fun for a mother."
Time and time again, we find people who've dominated a skill since an early age.
We hear how precociously Tiger Woods was at golf before he was three years old. But have you also paid attention to the childhood skills of Daniela? Or perhaps, Ramesh? What if I told you that Daniela is stunning good at eating with a soup spoon. That before she was two, she wasn't spilling soup at all. Or what about Ramesh, who walked before most other kids. Would Ramesh's walking abilities count as a talent?
It's sobering to realise we use the term "talented" only when referring to something we can't do right now.
Or at least do very well.
If Ramesh and Daniela's skills didn't make you raise your eyebrows, there's a reason why. We're only awed by skills that we don't have control over. If you could draw, write, or compute as well as the others, you wouldn't think they're talented. You might believe that it was innate or they were born with the skill, but you'd dismiss it just as quickly as you ignore "walking" and "holding spoons". The reason we're so awed by the capability of others is not that they're super-duper at something. We do so because we're not in the same league.
All of us today can use a computer
For us, using e-mail is as every day as wavy hair is for Renuka. Yet, almost everyone who'd grown up with typewriters and carbon papers could not imagine themselves on a computer. E-mail, as simple as it is, was something someone else did. And here were are, all equally talented at e-mail, no matter where we live or what we do.
Did the talent fairy just douse us with e-mail skills in the late 1990s?
Why was boring, daily e-mail so intimidating to entire generations that preceded the 90s? Why did almost everyone believe they were not skilled at computers, only to be supplanted by waves of generations that think nothing of using computers, phones and tablets—sometimes, simultaneously?
If you believe you (and others) have innate skills, there's no problem.
If you're already good at certain things, your confidence in yourself will take you further. Even so, you probably agree that we can learn other skills. You have learned to use a computer well, dance around e-mail, and drive a car—things that were unimaginable to earlier generations. This is to say that you can quickly and confidently learn and get screamingly good at several other skills, even while hugging the innateness of your being.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's not wavy hair or straight—it's both. It's time to make the best of what you believe you have and what you can be in the future.
Sean D'Souza is a Kiwi. Yes, one of those people who live in Middle Earth with millions of sheep. And it’s weird writing about myself here, but hey, I draw cartoons, write, take some cool photos (here’s a link to Rajasthan, India), {Note; it’s a 100 mb file that’s full of colour. You’ll have to be patient} cook Indian food, and am a part-time can opener for my wife. Oh, and there’s Psychotactics (why people buy and why they don’t).